Excerpt from TALK ABOUT A DREAM: Interview w/ Asbury Park Evening Press

Barbara Schoenweis The Asbury Park Evening Press, February 9, 1973 Springsteen’s fi rst album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., was released January 5, 1973. A month later he spoke with his hometown paper. Twenty-three years old, Springsteen was already a veteran of the Jersey Shore club scene. Some of the key themes to his early career are already here: his anxiety over being part of a big company and not having control, his insistence on playing good music, the comparisons to Bob Dylan, and his desire to be “honest” about what he is doing. Barbara Schoenweis notes that his songs “have an urgency that is typical of his generation, and more so, of Bruce himself.”

Springsteen Takes City Aloft

Music put Asbury Park on the map about 30 years ago when Frank Sinatra asked “Is it Grenada I see or only Asbury Park?”

Well, it’s back on the map again in a more contemporary version with Bruce Springsteen’s new LP for Columbia Records, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. The jacket is a blow-up of a popular color postcard found among the city’s famous boardwalk’s stands.

TALK ABOUT A DREAM 13

Bruce, who hails from Freehold and moved here when he was 18, has been singing and playing guitar in the area for nearly 10 of his 23 years, both on his own and with bands like Steel Mill. And now on his way to the top, he’ll be stopping at the Sunshine Inn tomorrow night to perform for his loyal and local fans. Then it’s off to California for six weeks where he’ll be on bills with groups like the Beach Boys, Paul Butterfield, and others. He recently finished a week’s gig at Max’s Kansas City, New York, which he says was an unusual experience because the crowd really came to listen to him and his band.

On one of his rare stays at his apartment in Bradley Beach, he visited The Press to talk about what it’s been like being pushed into the limelight in less than six weeks. Dressed in a tattered green leather jacket, jeans, a wrinkled shirt, and lace-up boots, he hardly looks like the picture of upcoming fame and fortune. He does not seem impressed, either, by the machinery that has put him where he is, only somewhat shaken up by it.

“There’s a lot of confusion,” he says, about how it’s been since his friend and local manager “Tinker” (Carl West) introduced him to Mike Appel and Jim Cretecos in New York and how from there he met John Hammond who got him on the Columbia label.

“He’s the same guy who introduced Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, and Bob Dylan,” says Bruce. “The man knows his business.”

“It’s weird working for a big company, though,” he mumbled in a characteristically sullen manner. “It was like pulling teeth to get me to sign. You’re not your own man anymore. But you can always get up and walk away from it all. What can they do, sue me for my shoes? I ain’t got nothin’ else.”

Of course, he admits, his attitude toward this whole new world changes each day with whether he’s eaten and slept well.

“Some days you think when you start making a record, people drive you nuts,” he says. “Somehow it all comes back to money. And then other days you meet some really great people and it seems all worth it and terrific.”

On the way to where he is now, Bruce spent his time playing back street clubs and bars in the area for pin money, and made himself a respected but controversial reputation, because he believed in being honest with his audience and doing only music he thought was good.

“I broke up a lot of bands in my day,” he admits with a wry grin, “because I’d get up there and start playing junk with them, and all of a sudden in the middle of it all, I’d just stop and say, ‘What is this jive?’ ”

14 Barbara Schoenweis

“All you can ask of a person is that he’s honest about what he’s doing.

I hope I’ll never change in that respect,” he continues. “The world does not need another four-piece rock ’n’ roll band, and the market needs less to be flooded with more junk.”

When you ask Bruce what his music is all about (he wrote and arranged and plays all nine songs on his album), he tells you to listen to the record. When you ask him about his background, he tells you that he doesn’t go in for a personality image, that it’s his music that should stand or fall on its own.

His music style is not unlike Bob Dylan’s in mood and sound, but it is also unique in the way he puts words and sounds together. His tunes are not melodic but they have a drive, an urgency that is typical of his generation, and more so, of Bruce himself. His lyrics go from poetic and highly intelligible to wanderings of a way-out mind or a bad trip.

Among the best songs on the album is “Lost in the Flood,” a piece which marries the hypocrisy of the Vietnam War to the hypocrisy of our everyday lives. Bruce has a knack for bringing things to light in vivid images, some of which are drawn from local landmarks and the landmarks of his past.

The ragamuffin gunner is returning home like a hungry runaway.

He walks through the town all alone He must be from the fort he hears the high school girls say.

His countryside’s burnin’ with wolfman fairies dressed in drag for homicide The hit and run, plead sanctuary ’neath a holy stone they hide.

They’re breakin’ beams and crosses with a spastic’s reelin’ perfection Nuns run bald through Vatican halls pregnant, pleadin’ immaculate conception.

And everybody’s wrecked on Main Street from drinking unholy blood.

And then there’s what Bruce does admit to as his “nothing” songs: Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teen-age diplomat. In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat. With a bolder on my shoulder, feelin’ kinda older I tripped the merry-go-round. With this very unpleasing sneezing and wheezing the calliope crashed to the ground.

TALK ABOUT A DREAM 15

He plays the acoustic, electric guitars, and bass as well as the harmonica on his album. He’s a self-taught musician, who can read music “a little” and who started playing piano when his grandfather gave him one at age 14.

“It was one of the nicest things that ever happened to me,” he says.

Bruce is backed up by a group of local musicians who, at this point, have no trade name. They are Vincent Lopez on drums, Clarence Clemons on sax and background vocals, Garry Tallent, bass, David Sancious, piano and organ. Harold Wheeler and Richard Davis fill in on piano and bass in a couple of songs.

What’s different about Bruce’s songs that made him catch the ears of the music world?

“Well, it’s me,” he says.

And about the future?

“It’s a waste of time to think about it,” he comments. “I’d rather think about my music.”